An important couple of hours in the RSL

The first rain for several weeks as I drove into Oxford this morning, but after the amazing weather in Scotland last month, I can't say I have been much bothered by its absence.

The Radcliffe Science library remains in a somewhat chaotic state. Section QB, the one I most use, has moved again as space is made for a large metal cage which will house some of the rarer books in the Bodleian at some point. Many references for books and journals are of little use given the upheaval - it is often better to just take a refernce to the service desk and ask them there. And that process turns up a really important find

Once or twice over the last six months or so there have been references in one or two journal articles to a publication called Vistas in Astronomy. Needless to say, LSE's library does not have this and I hadn't looked at the RSL as my time there is still being spent on copying articles from the Journal of the History of Astronomy. But today, for a change, I spent some time on the online terminals in the RSL and found not only the relevant journal, but also that it is available online but only through the RSL terminals.

What is of great note, is volume 18 of V in A - a monumental 1100 page edition commemorating the 400th anniversary of the birth of Kepler. Available secondhand for the princely sum of close to £300, there it was online - dozens of articles on just about every aspect of Kepler that one could wish for. Kepler's time in Linz or Ulm or Regensburg (where the house in which he died become a Kepler museum), Kepler as theologian, astrologist, his views on alchemy, 11 articles on Kepler and mathematics, data processing for the Rudolphine tables, lots of optical stuff, his place in science-fiction, Kepler as poet (!), the Kepler-Schickart calculating machine, and so on. What a find.

At a cost of 7p per page, I printed 450 pages - two lever arch files worth - at one-tenth of the cost of buying the secondhand copy. I am delighted with this find. Hardly any of the individual papers appear as references elsewhere, so there is a goldmine of material here. One of the best mornings I have had for ages